I'm not doing motion capture but I have some iClone animations purchased from the store.

When I use LL "transfer" function, animations are not sent over (that I can tell.

Do I need to "record" them in Unreal and then reconstruct the clips there? That would be inefficient.

The Iclone / Unreal documentation is really out of date and very incomplete for building interactive game characters. It would be nice to see a more complete manual and more up to date videos. For example, simple export of animation is not documented anywhere; everything I assumes I'm just playing with live capture and there's nothing about managing recordings, reusing them in unreal, etc. Starting to wonder whether Live Link was a good purchase (had to buy 3dxchange, not cheap) as it seems really buggy, incomplete and poorly documented.

You might need to view the tutorials from Reallusion Youtube Channel. Livelink is working fine

online manual

I've read all the manual and watched all the videos; thanks for sharing the pointers, but I wouldn't be asking if the answers were in the manual.

The question is about how to transfer an existing animation - i.e. one purchased from the store.

I bought LiveLink for it's "one-click transfer" and "advanced animation." It seemed to me that this would exist transfering basic, canned animations, but as far as I can tell Live Link does not transfer animations, but will only allow them to be streamed in real time, which is super-inefficient if I need to move over 100+ animations (which I do.)

3DExchange produces some retargeting errors. Transfer in Live Link fixes these, but doesn't transfer the animations. So I need to either debug 3DExchange, which seems to be a dead product, or wait until LiveLink can send my animation library over, or just give up on animations from Reallusion.

So, if anybody knows: does Live Link transfer pre-existing animation clips along with the character, or is it limited to "live performance" of animations?

Yes or no would be awesome. Assuming the answer is no and that I should buy my animations from the Unreal store from now on. Which would be a shame as I'd love to support Reallusion.

- Matt

Appreciate your reply, but my question is whether LiveLink will transfer existing animations, and as far as I can tell it can't (there's no documention, UI, or video showing how.)
I get the live performance feature - cool - and the transfer of the basic mesh and skeleton - cool - I just need to get 100 anims into unreal somehow and I'm a little surprised that this doesn't seem to be a feature of my new $600 advanced animation tool.

It's a "live" link. So you send realtime animation which you can record with with the scene recorder in UE4. If you need to move a whole bunch of animation files, you can just export them as FBX and import them into UE4. Either CC3 Pipeline or 3DXchange will do that. See here for exporting just animations from CC3 Pipeline.

You might be a little bit confused what is LiveLink and its purpose

Just so that we're clear, I'm going to find you, and when I do I'm going to kiss you square on the lips.  There might be some tongue.

You have no idea how badly I have been struggling with this.  I've wasted an entire day.  I work for myself, so I don't normally take days off to work on projects like this.  All day long I've been following the videos.  Idk how I missed it, but there is a button you push to transfer the character.  I just uploaded an FBX and couldn't figure out why it wasn't linking.  All day.  So I had my main project and couldn't get it to work.  So if life has taught me anything if you can't figure out what you are doing, you need to dumb it down.  So instead of using the characters I was using (there was some naming issues there that I'm not sure if they were causing problems or not).  Then that wasn't working.  So then I made an entirely new project and started over from scratch yet again with no success.  My last ditch effort was to scroll through the forums before posting a question bc I didn't want to be "That guy."  Found your post on the second or third post I read and bam.  Push the button.  Hours worth of time fucking with something to get to the point of "Push de button."  Seriously though, ty.  I was so angry/discouraged/defeated.  Especially when the videos were like "Do this, do this and BAM!"

Live Link problem IC7 to UNREAL! Everything works fine to the part of transfering a character over to unreal, then it stops! LINK does nothing. the tutorial online is old and doesent show identical procedure so that didnt help. can someone PLZ show me a updated step by step? i know its just 1 little thing i missed but cant find out what.

..SO.. i realized that i had to manually transfer a blueprint over to th character so far so good still struggling a bit though...anny 1 knows where to find info on recording the live link?

I am really really new to the realusion suite, unreal and 3d animation in general, however i do hope you have solved your issues. I had the same problem. The only thing i needed to do was transfer the character using the "transfer" button in iclone, then the "activate link" worked like a dream.